Children’s Rights Contextualized

Abstract

Today, children are understood as ‘subjects of rights’ or ‘rights holders’. Accordingly, they have their own rights and are not simply reliant on the benevolence of those on whose support they depend. Insofar as children continue to be dependant, this dependence is cushioned by their own rights which aim at controlling any arbitrary behaviour towards them and strive to gradually secure autonomy for their actions. According to this concept, children are no longer only ‘minors’ who possess very few or no rights, but persons who partly share equal rights and partly other or additional rights they can exercise. The question is, what determines whether these rights can actually be exercised? In this chapter, different aspects of pitfalls in reference to children’s rights are discussed, as well as what can or ought to be done in order to make rights accessible to children and to turn them into something that is, in their view, valuable for them. To achieve this, an understanding of children’s rights that reflects politics and context is needed.